CONTENTS
End Users Execution Safety Extra Challenges

Our Goal

Our project aims to produce melatonin in an environmentally friendly, safe, efficient, and sustainable way and to popularize melatonin to help people with insomnia. There are three ways to obtain melatonin: chemical production, animal extraction, and plant extraction. People mainly use the chemical method as the primary way to produce melatonin, as it can produce melatonin in batches through a fixed process. It does not require a complex process to extract a small amount of inefficient melatonin like the other two methods and avoids unethical extraction from animals. However, the disadvantages of chemical production are apparent. The production process requires chemicals, which cannot guarantee safety, and chemical by-products can cause pollution. As a result, the plant production of melatonin became our research goal. Our plan will increase melatonin production in the plant body to achieve safety, avoid pollution, and high yield the production of melatonin, helping people with insomnia disorders by melatonin adjust sleep while also ensuring the sustainable development of melatonin production.

End Users

Melatonin's primary role is to help people adjust their sleep schedule. So our end users are people with sleep disorders. For example, older people who produce less melatonin as they age, people who work irregular hours at night, people who have difficulty falling asleep because of poor sleep quality, people who have some medical conditions that cause sleep disorders, and so on. In addition, the way we produce melatonin is not only safe and environmentally friendly but also increases the yield with high efficiency, which will lead to a decrease in the price of melatonin health products in the market. This way, people with insomnia disorder and ordinary economic conditions can afford it.

We also will work closely with companies that make melatonin health care products to better engage our project to the real world. These companies will be our cooperative companies to implement our project and technology to the real world.

Execution

We will publicize the advantages of plant-based melatonin production, encourage more people to understand the significance of sustainable development and the help of this technology for people with insomnia disorder, and attract public support to publicize this technology. Our preliminary plan is to train our employees to learn the techniques in the future. The cooperative company may choose to provide only the site for melatonin production or provide the location, equipment, raw materials, and other resources at the same time, that is, send our employees to the cooperative company to provide technical services for plant production of melatonin, while the cooperative company shall choose other resources according to its situation. In the future, we hope that this technology in the production of melatonin by China's health care products production license. Then the technology will eventually make into health care products to help more Chinese people who have sleep disorders, step by step, according to the melatonin requirements in different countries. Therefore, we hope we can play out the advantages of this technology, bringing it to the international market, the approval from the global market, To be a meaningful technology for helping people with sleep disorders around the world.

Safety

We need to consider several safety issues when implementing the production line. One is ensuring the production line is safe and suitable for the end user. Since all the genes are from the plant with no artificial chemical additive, it’s a more environmentally friendly way to produce. Meanwhile, synthetic biology is a new concept to human beings, especially in China. We need to get approval from government offices before having the actual product. We also need to educate the public and promote the advantages of using such new ways to solve social problems.

Extra Challenges

1. Efficiency

Melatonin extraction from plants is not widespread because the amount of melatonin in plants is low, and the extraction methods are often inefficient. Our technique has improved the efficiency of melatonin production in plants, but the process is time-consuming and will not surpass the efficiency of chemical products for the time being. Therefore, our technology cannot reach chemical production in terms of efficiency for the time being, which leads to the popularization of this technology to replace chemical production.

2. Use Approval

Our technology will eventually produce melatonin in a form that is easy for people with insomnia disorders to take. However, China and countries worldwide have different regulations on melatonin as a medicine or health care product. Whether it is a health care product or treatment, the technology used to make melatonin and the form of melatonin given to people need to be strictly checked by the respective regulations of different countries. Therefore, we must ensure that our technology is safe and meets the government's requirements before production.

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